What Lizzie did next

Page Tools

Jennifer Ehle used to joke that the only role that would
lure her away from her family was that of Tracy Lord in The
Philadelphia Story. Justine Picardie meets the actress as she
prepares to follow in the footsteps of Katharine
Hepburn.

When Jennifer Ehle arrives for tea at London's Berkeley Hotel
she slips into her seat without drawing any attention to herself;
and it's not only her quiet unobtrusiveness and punctuality that
are unexpected - it's also that just after the introductions are
done, she takes a sip of water before staring thoughtfully at her
glass.

"What very thin glass this is," she says, holding it up to the
light. "Wouldn't it be awful if I bit into it or somehow broke it?
Do you ever get that feeling, when you're faced with such a fragile
thing?"

This slightly eccentric opening gambit is not how most
celebrated actresses operate. But then Ehle was never an operator;
she has spent most of her career behaving in pleasingly unexpected
ways. Because here is the woman who became famous as Elizabeth
Bennet in the BBC's wildly successful adaptation of Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice but then refused to capitalise on the
rapturous response; indeed, she turned down all interview requests
and ensconced herself at Stratford with the Royal Shakespeare
Company rather than head for Hollywood.

Since then she has been better known for her stage appearances,
winning a Tony in 2000 for her role in Tom Stoppard's The Real
Thing on Broadway. (When she moved into films - most notably
Wilde with Stephen Fry and Possession alongside
Gwyneth Paltrow - Ehle remained publicity shy.) Anyway, here she
is, back in London again - after three years' absence from the
stage, during which time she got married and had a son - about to
star opposite Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic in a revival of The
Philadelphia Story.

Her role - as the East Coast sophisticate Tracy Lord, on the eve
of a second marriage and also of an awakening in life - was made
famous by Katharine Hepburn, first on Broadway and then in the film
version, and thereafter by Grace Kelly in the musical remake,
High Society.

"So, no pressure there, then," Ehle says, laughing. "Actually,
I've never seen the Hepburn film, and now I think I'm going to
avoid watching it."

For anyone interested in those invidious comparisons, Ehle looks
nothing like Hepburn, aside from her similarly, implausibly high
cheekbones, and the fact that she is wearing a dark pinstripe Chloe
suit with wide-legged trousers, cut with the same kind of
understated boyish chic that Hepburn made her trademark. But at 35,
about the same age as Hepburn was when she filmed The
Philadelphia Story, Ehle is also very beautiful:
porcelain-skinned, clear-eyed, self-possessed, like a young Meryl
Streep at certain angles and Cate Blanchett at others (the latter
happens to be a friend).

Both Spacey and Jerry Zaks, the American director in charge of
this new production, feel confident to make comparisons between
Ehle and Tracy Lord, a character said to have been originally
inspired by Hepburn.

"She's a woman of strength and integrity who comes to discover
her own heart," Spacey says, describing the fictional heroine, "and
I think Jennifer has those same qualities."

Zaks - who arrives at the Old Vic with four Tony awards under
his belt - takes the comparison further: "Tracy Lord is capable,
confident, absolutely focused - and Jennifer suggests all this,
even when at rest, in the same way that Hepburn did. These are
women who make you believe that everything is going swimmingly in
their lives - and then you realise the hidden depths of their
vulnerability. That's what makes Jennifer so perfect for the
part."

It is also, Ehle says, the only role that could have persuaded
her to come out of her self-imposed retirement after winning the
Tony. "My son has just turned two and I'd said I didn't want to do
another play until he was at least three years old," she says.

"We've been living in blissful reclusion in upstate New York and
my mantra was no work until George is older - unless I got to play
Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story. It was like a joke
between me and my husband - and, of course, I never thought that it
would actually happen. But it did, and I'm thrilled."

So she's camping out in her parents' flat in Chelsea (they are
currently living elsewhere in the US) with her husband, an American
writer named Michael Ryan, whose privacy Ehle has been as fiercely
protective of as she is their son's. "The three of us have been so
cloistered until now, but I think we'll do just fine."

After all, it's the way that Ehle herself was raised, as the
peripatetic only child of the actress Rosemary Harris (British
theatre royalty, though possibly best known now for playing
Spider-Man's feisty aunt, opposite Tobey Maguire) and American
novelist John Ehle (who comes, like Ryan, from North Carolina).
Jennifer grew up with a mid-Atlantic accent, switching her colours
when necessary - a talent honed as she moved between 14 different
schools - though in adulthood, she has settled for a natural,
soft-spoken American; a gentle voice but unexpected, even so, given
that Ehle has more often been seen as the quintessential English
rose.

"There is a cost that comes with moving schools so often," she
admits, "and it's not what I want for my son when he gets older,
but it did make me very adaptable. I became aware of what was
missing from the social structure of each class that I arrived in,
and made sure to fill that gap."

Thus she learnt how to make the transition from English private
girls' school (Queen's College on Harley Street) to American high
schools in North Carolina, New York, Santa Monica, among others,
and then to a boarding school in Michigan.

It's an adaptability that has served her well as an actor: right
from the start, when she came to study at the Central School of
Speech and Drama in London, shifted to an English accent ("I
thought that would be less awkward") and was duly signed up on the
spot by Sir Peter Hall to play a well-bred nymphomaniac in his
rollicking television adaptation of Mary Wesley's The Camomile
Lawn. The tabloids were as transfixed as the broadsheets, and
further headlines ensued when she was subsequently cast in an Alan
Bleasdale television film set in France - "mainly along the lines
of Sex-Mad Jenny Does It Froggy Style", she says, smiling.

But when, soon afterwards, she won a BAFTA (British Academy of
Film and Television Arts) for Pride and Prejudice, it was
widely assumed that she would thereafter be consigned, in her
words, "to working only in corsets and a bonnet".

Hence her regular decisions to set off at tangents in her
career, defying the predictions of others. All of which augurs well
for her portrayal of Tracy Lord, who is the glamorous heroine of
one of the great Hollywood comedies of all time and also a woman
who ends up surprising herself, as well as her audience.

Thus far, for all the inherent risks involved in reviving a
much-loved classic, this production of The Philadelphia
Story is already a success: it has taken more than $3 million
in advance bookings, the highest figure for years in the West End.
Indeed, the initial signs look rather better than they did when the
play's author, Philip Barry, launched it on Broadway in 1939: after
a string of hits in the early 1930s, he had suffered several
failures in a row; while Hepburn had been labelled as "box-office
poison" after a succession of her films had flopped.

You know what happened next, of course: the play was a big
success, backed by Howard Hughes, who was involved with Hepburn at
the time, and it marked the start of a second round of fame for
Hepburn in Hollywood, when she starred in the film version opposite
Cary Grant.

Grant's role - that of Tracy Lord's first husband, the
infinitely charming C.K. Dexter Haven - is being taken on by
Spacey, and as he himself remarks, wisely, when I ask him if it is
as intimidating a prospect as is faced by his co-star: "You have to
remind yourself that no one owns a role in a stage play - you just
have to say to yourself, 'I'm not filling anyone's shoes, I'm
trying to make a pair of my own'." Which is, in a sense, what
The Philadelphia Story is about - not only for Tracy Lord
but also the magazine reporter played by Jimmy Stewart in the film,
sent to file a story about Tracy's second wedding when he would
rather be writing a literary novel of society gossip. "It's a play
where the characters have to come face to face with who they really
are," Jerry Zaks says, "and that's a bitch of a journey."

It is therefore very tempting - though probably useless, given
her capacity for privacy and self-containment - to speculate on
whether Ehle has made a similar journey. What is true is that in
the past her actions have suggested a certain ambivalence about her
career. "There's never been a game plan and I suppose I've had an
uneasy relationship with my ambition," she says. "Someone who had
been in my year at drama school once said to me that I was
terrifyingly ambitious back then. Which was not at all what I felt
at the time - I felt paralysed with shyness, though that
evaporated. But there are times when I still feel that ambition is
a dirty word - and yet it shouldn't be. What's the point of doing a
brilliant Hedda Gabler in my back garden if no one will ever see
it?"

"After The Real Thing, I thought about giving up acting
because it's difficult to have a rich life outside your work when
you're an actress, a private life that can survive being picked up
and put down. That's what I thought, anyway.

"But now I've been living so solidly, in the centre of my
family, with my husband and our child, I feel more comfortable with
the idea of picking up the work and putting it down again.

She pauses, and then says, "You know what else I've learnt? That
it's all right not to ride the crest of the wave. Every time a wave
comes along I retreat, and I haven't come to any harm yet."